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The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: ‘Past and Present’ of Thailand’s Organic Crisis
Abstract
Contemporary political crises in Thailand in the recent decade─the present─are traditionally conceived of as crisis of political morality. The conservative social forces in the Thai state perceived ex-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his social and political allies as major threat to the nation only because of their lack of political integrity. This paper contests this political ‘common sense’ and argues against conservative conception of the world that the crises of the Thai state, in fact, is an organic, and also ongoing, crisis. This ‘organic crisis’ have been constituted by several structural reasons and it should be seen against ‘history’─the past─ of the Thai state in both political economy and social-ideological terrains. The paper also argues that grasping crisis of the Thai state in the last decade has to conceive of Thaksin as a ‘part of social process’ rather than a single political actor. In addition, the structural crisis in Thailand should be seen as, what Gramsci calls, a crisis of hegemony─that the old is dying and the new cannot be born─which contains three crucial underlying conflicts including social and economic disparity, overwhelming roles of royalism-nationalism, and harsh applications of the lèse majesté laws. To overcome the political common sense over Thaksin of the Thai rightists, and to restore long term social and political orders of the Thai state, it is necessary to reveal these three fundamental problems to the fore and critically examine, discuss, and debate them. In short, it might not be an absolute way to achieve a just and fairer society for the Thai state, however, thinking in a ‘Gramscian way’ is crucial as a very first step to critique of the conservative common sense and to imagine, with hope, for long term solutions towards organic crisis of the Thai state.
At the height of the 2020 protests, the Thai government implemented vigorous online censorship to curb public criticism of the monarchy. In doing so the government cited its obligation to safeguard Thailand’s ‘cyber sovereignty’, which is the focus of this article. I argue that this concept is constructed as a tool that can be wielded opportunistically to ensure regime security, which largely depends on the security of the throne. Notably, the Thai state’s construction of cyber sovereignty is modelled on territorial sovereignty: it has elements of territorial nationhood, insofar as cyberspace is treated as if it has a physical existence. However, this conceptualisation of cyber sovereignty is flawed: it elides the significant differences between these two forms of sovereignty, particularly regarding sovereign power and its limits. Despite its flawed nature, the Thai case is part of a wider on-going debate about cyber sovereignty, whereby some countries promote tighter Internet controls while others support a more liberal cyber regime.
This paper provides Gramsci’s conceptions of education and schooling in both school and beyond school levels. Amongst limited discussion on this subject in Thai academia, grasping Gramsci ideas of schooling provides a challenging perspective on traditional (and uncritical) learning process and social relations of power. The paper argues that learning process ought to construct a clear-minded person who, to some extent, can develop their thought to cultural struggle in any given society.
The ideas of schooling and education are the real basis of social existence. They shape and direct future form of social relations. Therefore, to subvert the existed social relations and imaging the new one, we should make our own history. The vital point of departure is to construct critical and dialectical learning process right now.
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